Stanford University

Announcing the Stig and Brita-Stina Hagstrom Memorial Fund

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The Europe Center at the Stanford Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and The Stanford Center for Innovation in Learning announce the Stig and Brita-Stina Hagstrom Memorial Fund in memory of Stig and Brita-Stina Hagstrom to be used to support fellowships and activities designed to support Stanford-Sweden international exchange.

The Stig and Brita-Stina Hagstrom Memorial Fund is dedicated to build upon and grow the relationship originally fostered by Stig Hagstrom between Stanford University and Sweden in academic and cultural aspects by funding official speakers, students, and events to the benefit of the University and Swedish society.

Gifts in support of this fund will be used for the provision of cross-cultural opportunities for collaboration, both academic and social (for example, coffee afternoons, film nights, speaker events).

Contact and donor information: Those wishing to donate to the Stig and Brita-Stina Hagstrom Memorial Fund may use the contact below.

Checks, made payable to Stanford University--in Memory of Stig and Brita-Stina Hagstrom, may be sent to:

Neil Penick
Hagstrom Memorial Fund
Encina Hall
616 Serra Street
Stanford, CA 94305-6055

Email: npenick@stanford.edu
Tel: (650) 723-8681

Details on the programming in the Stanford-Sweden relationship may be found below.

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While world seeks to defeat terror, Stockholm welcomes notorious terrorist into country

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The number one topic around the globe has been the world after Bin Laden and the appropriate ways for democracies to dispose of terrorists. From Washington, to Brussels, to Tel Aviv and Islamabad, pundits and average citizens have weighed in on the debate.

Sweden’s contribution to the question of how to deal with terrorism was to provide a welcome mat - in the form of a taxpayer-funded lecture tour - for the notorious Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) airplane hijacker, Leila Khaled.

Khaled literally burst onto the world scene in 1969 when she boarded TWA’s flight 840 in Rome with hand grenades taped around her waist. She stormed the cockpit, declaring she belonged to the Che Guevara Commando Unit of the Marxist-Leninist PFLP. Terrified passengers were held hostage and only released after Israel agreed to free Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli prisons. One year later, she masterminded a new brutal hijacking after undergoing plastic surgery to conceal her identity.

In 2002, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, The European Union through its European Council decided to include the PFLP on its list of terrorist groups.

The people of Israel are all too familiar with the savagery of the PFLP. It took responsibility for the 2001 assassination of Tourism Minister, Rehavam Zeevi. On Friday night, March 11th 2011, two PFLP members butchered the Fogel family in Itamar, including four-and eleven-year-old children and a three-month infant.

Ms. Khaled sits on the PFLP Central Committee and has not expressed regret for her involvement in terrorism. Because of her history of aiding and abetting terrorism, a police complaint was recently issued against her in Sweden for gross violations of international law.

But that came too late. During her tax-payer funded visit to Sweden, Khaled spoke at the May Day demonstrations of the Stalinist Swedish Communist Party and the Anarcho-syndicalist Trade Union Federation. She held publicly funded lectures at an Art Gallery and spoke on developments in the Middle East at the publicly- funded Södertörn
University College.

Incredibly, Khaled also participated at a seminar on political activism arranged by the Left Party represented in Sweden’s Parliament.

The organizers of her appearances had nothing but praise for the PFLP leader. Anna Ahlstrand, Project Manager at Konsthall C, which is funded by the government’s Arts Grant Committee, declared “she is an icon for many people”. Jonatan Habib Engqvist, Project Manager at the Governmental Arts Grants Committee that financed her tour described the arch terrorist as “a very established feminist thinker.”

Irresponsible behavior
Unfortunately, Leila Khaled isn’t the first member of a Palestinian terrorist group to get special treatment from Stockholm. In 2006, the Swedish consulate in Jerusalem, in contravention of EU regulations, granted a Schengen visa to Hamas’ Minister of Refugees, Atef Adwan. Such a visa makes it possible for the bearer to travel across 15 European Countries. That decision provoked protests from Israel, which said it lent legitimacy to Hamas, and from France, which had rejected earlier visa requests by Hamas leaders.

So far Sweden’s decision to grant entry to Khaled – a leading representative of an organization deemed a terrorist group by more than 30 countries, including Sweden, all EU Member States and the United States – hasn’t spurred protest from the US or other
European countries.

But the decision to allow her into Sweden could have broader consequences. It comes at a time when many European nations want to take back direct control of their national frontiers. Indeed, the European Commission is currently debating the re-imposition of border controls within the so-called Schengen region.

Leila Khalid’s taxpayer-funded trip comes even as Swedish authorities continue to turn a deaf ear to repeated calls from the Jewish Community and the Simon Wiesenthal Center to fund security for Jewish institutions facing increasing anti-Semitism and global Islamist threats.

The irresponsible behavior of Swedish authorities will likely doom any future role in Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. Back in 2000, following a more even-handed Middle East policy under then Swedish PM Goran Persson, Stockholm did help facilitate Israeli Palestinian negotiations.

According to leaked WikiLeaks reports, Carl Bildt, the current Foreign Minister is characterized, as a “medium size dog with big dog attitude.” But his government hasn’t even bothered to present a veneer of neutrality when it comes to the Holy Land, as evidenced by the fact that not a single minister visited Israel during the Swedish EU Presidency.

On the Iranian front, Bildt distinguished himself as one of the EU leaders most opposed to increased sanctions against Tehran. The very same diplomat rushed to Istanbul in June 2010 to personally greet and have his picture taken with Swedish participants in the infamous Turkish Gaza Flotilla.

If Sweden is serious about opposing terrorism and promoting Mideast peace, it must reveal the circumstances behind Leila Khalid’s entry and departure from Swedish and EU Territory and who approved the allocation of taxpayers’ funds for a woman who stands for everything Osama Bin Laden lived and died for.

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Daniel Schatz
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Daniel Schatz

The Europe Center
Encina Hall, 2nd Floor
616 Serra Street
Stanford, CA 94305-6165
The Europe Center
Encina Hall, 2nd Floor
616 Serra Street
Stanford, CA 94305-6165

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Anna Lindh Fellow (Spring 2011)
Doctoral Candidate, Political Science, Humboldt University of Berlin
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Daniel Schatz is a Visiting Anna Lindh Researcher at the Europe Center and a Doctoral Candidate in Political Science at the Humboldt University of Berlin.

Schatz’s doctoral dissertation, “The Politics of Foreign Policy Change: An Analysis of Sweden’s Middle East Policy 1996-2006” examines the dynamics of foreign policy change by analyzing changes in Sweden’s foreign policy towards Israel and the Palestinians. His main research interests are international relations, foreign policy analysis, foreign policy change, European and Scandinavian politics, the Middle East and the Arab-Israeli Conflict.

Prior to joining Stanford University, Schatz’s professional appointments include positions at the European Parliament, the UN Headquarters, the Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly, the World Jewish Congress Headquarters and the Canadian Embassy in Stockholm. He was nominated as a Candidate for Sweden's Parliament in 2006 and 2010.

Schatz is an editorial page contributor in Svenska Dagbladet, one of Sweden’s largest dailies. His articles and opinion pieces on contemporary international affairs appear regularly in European and international newspapers. He graduated with a Masters Degree in Political Science and European Studies from the University of Lund and has completed studies in International Relations the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and New York University. He speaks Swedish, English, Polish, German, Russian, Hebrew and Yiddish.

Call for Papers: Cosmopolitanism in a Wider Context - Conceptualizing Past and Present

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The conference is organized by the Centre for Baltic and East European Studies (CBEES) at Södertörn University, in cooperation with the Nobel Museum.

Ideas and aims

Cosmopolitanism has been a major topic in academia since the end of the cold war. While cosmopolitanism and multiculturalism have been recognized officially, xenophobia has become more intense. Is cosmopolitanism a way out of the xenophobic state, or is the interest in cosmopolitanism in itself adding to antagonism and disrespect for human rights? The problem can be highlighted from several different aspects. However, cosmopolitanism has been extensively theorized within the social sciences, where the semantic field often tends to be separated from its historical context. In an effort to make the academic discussion more responsive to conceptual and historical perspectives, we would like to gather researchers with different backgrounds to an international conference on cosmopolitanism, with a special view to its conceptual history.

The aim of the conference is to present a new perspective on a contemporary discourse, which is often dominated by ahistorical presumptions. The conference seeks to create a meeting between the social sciences and humanities in order to examine how the history, and prehistory, of cosmopolitanism has left traces in contemporary notions and perceptions.  We are interested in how the history of the concept says something about the often contradictory meanings attributed to the term today—empirically, theoretically, and normatively. What impact did the events of 1989 have on the conceptualization of cosmopolitanism? How have the concepts of cosmopolitanism and the cosmopolitan been used in the past—and how and why are they used differently today? Can the cosmopolitan project be released from its original Enlightenment impulses of Eurocentrism and Occidentalism? How do we create or reconstruct a linguistic horizon of intelligibility that transcends rather than reproduces the dichotomizing implications of cosmopolitanism, such as between West/East (and North/South)?

Keynote speakers

Andrew Vincent, Prof. of Political Theory, University of Sheffield
Georg Cavallar, ass. Prof. of Philosophy, University of Vienna
Galin Tihanov, Prof. of Comparative Literature/Intellectual History, University of Manchester
Mica Nava, Professor of Cultural Studies, University of East London

Call for papers: Available here on the conference website.

Where: Södertörn University, Alfred Nobels allé 7, Flemingsberg/Huddinge, Sweden; The Nobel Museum, Stortorget 2, Old Town, Stockholm, Sweden.

Language: English

Anyone interested in participating in the conference with a paper must send in an abstract to cosmopolitanism@sh.se by 19th May, at the latest. The abstracts will be peer reviewed.

For registration and further information, please visit the conference web page at www.sh.se/cbees (follow the link ‘Conferences’).

Coordinator and contact: PhD Kristian Petrov, cosmopolitanism@sh.se

The conference is organized in connection with the research project ‘East of Cosmopolis.’

Website (in Swedish): www.sh.se/adress

Website (in English):  www.sh.se (In English/How to find us)

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Environmental Impact of the Nuclear Fuel Cycle

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Reuben W. Hills Conference Room

Rod Ewing Visiting Professor at CISAC; Edward H. Kraus Distinguished University Professor in the Department of Geological Sciences at the University of Michigan Speaker
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From One Imperial Periphery to Another: The Experiences of a Governor's Wife in Russian Alaska

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This seminar will focus on Susanna Rabow-Edling's book project about three governor's wives, who accompanied their husbands to Russian Alaska in the period 1829-1864. Dr. Rabow-Edling will explore how they tried to fulfill sometimes conflicting roles as wives, mothers, and representatives of empire in this distant colony and how contemporary notions of womanhood affected them. The seminar will focus on one of these women, Anna Furuhjelm.

Susanna Rabow-Edling is a research fellow at the Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Uppsala University. She received her PhD from Stockholm University and spent a year as a visiting scholar at Cornell University before taking up a position at the department for East European Studies at Uppsala. She is the author of Slavophile Thought and the Politics of Cultural Nationalism (SUNY Press, 2006) as well as several articles about cultural and civic aspects of Russian nationalism.

Her main research interests are: Russian political thought, nationalism, imperialism (especially the civilizing mission), identity issues, and gender studies.

 

Audio Synopsis:

Dr. Rabow-Edling's talk traces the journeys of three women - Elizabeth, Margareta, and Anna - from mainland Russia to Sitka, the capital of Russian Alaska, as governors’ wives. The presentation draws upon the women's diaries and letters home to explore the experience of being a Russian governor's wife in Alaska, including what was expected of the women as wives and mothers, as representatives of the Russian empire, and as participants in the "civilizing mission" of Russian Alaska. Dr . Rabow-Edling also explores how the women, especially Anna, experienced the social and religious environment of the time.

Elizabeth, Margaret and Anna had more in common than being governors' wives. All three came from the Western periphery of the empire - Finland, and the Baltics -  thus representing ethnic minorities. As Lutherans, they were also religious minorities. All three married Finnish governors. Each was young and newly married when they began their journey, and each gave birth to their first child en route to or upon arrival in Sitka.

While all three women were unprepared for the isolation of Sitka life,  they adjusted differently to their new environment. Anna, the least confident, was overwhelmed by the harsh weather, the wilderness, and the native as well as Russian residents. She shunned a public role and took refuge in the sphere of home and family. Margareta was more self-confident, highly educated, and comfortable in Sitka society. However, her arrival was marred by the death of her firstborn son, which drove her in to a lonely depression. Elizabeth was brave, energetic, and curious, as well as less enthusiastic about religion and motherhood. Dr. Rabow-Edling describes how the women engaged differently with the Russian 'civilizing mission,' which was premised on the idea that only European women could civilize native women. She also describes how interactions with the local orthodox church could be difficult, as when Anna was prevented from distributing Bibles to convert the local people.

In conclusion, Dr. Rabow-Edling highlights the clash between the ideals of “true womanhood” prevalent at the time – emphasizing piety, purity and domestication - and the realities and demands of frontier life.

A discussion session following the presentation raised questions regarding the effects of the French invasion of Russia in 1812, the differences in gender roles between mainland Russia and Alaska, why these three governors chose Lutheran wives, and why Russia appointed so many Finnish governors.

Richard and Rhoda Goldman Conference Room

Susanna Rabow-Edling

616 Serra Street
Encina Hall C205-7
Stanford, CA 94305-6165

(650) 724-9217
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Research Fellow, Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Uppsala University
The Europe Center Visiting Scholar
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Susanna Rabow-Edling is a research fellow at the Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Uppsala University. She received her PhD from Stockholm University and spent a year as a visiting scholar at Cornell University before taking up a position at the department for East European Studies at Uppsala. She is the author of Slavophile Thought and the Politics of Cultural Nationalism (SUNY Press, 2006) as well as several articles about cultural and civic aspects of Russian nationalism.

Her main research interests are: Russian political thought, nationalism, imperialism (especially the civilizing mission), identity issues, and gender studies.

 Susanna is currently working on a book project about three governor’s wives, who accompanied their husbands to Russian Alaska and lived there in the period between 1829 and 1864. She is interested in how they tried to fulfill sometimes conflicting roles as wives, mothers, and representatives of empire in this distant colony and how contemporary notions of womanhood affected them.

Susanna Rabow-Edling Speaker
Seminars

On the State's Choice of Oil Company: Risk Management and the Frontier of the Petroleum Industry

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Conventional wisdom holds that oil sector nationalizations are rooted in political motives of the petroleum states, which perceive value in the direct control of resource development though a state enterprise.  State motives are inarguably important.  At the same time, we argue in this paper that constraints of risk significantly affect a state's choice of which agent to employ to extract its hydrocarbons.  Implicit in much current debate is the idea that private, international oil companies (IOCs) and the state-controlled, national oil companies (NOCs) are direct competitors, and that the former may face threats to their very existence in an era of increased state control. 

In fact, IOCs and NOCs characteristically supply very different functions to governments when it comes to managing risk.  For reasons we discuss, IOCs excel at managing risk while NOCs typically do not.  IOCs, NOCs, and a third type of player, the oil service company, will all continue to exist because their distinct talents are needed by states seeking to realize the value of their petroleum resources.  However, the relative positions of these different players have changed substantially over time, and will continue to do so, in response to the shifting needs of oil-rich states.

In the first part of this paper, we explore the nature and sources of risk in the petroleum industry, how these risks change over time, the task of managing petroleum risks, and the variable capacity of state and private companies to manage them.  In the second part, we apply qualitative and quantitative approaches to test the idea that risk significantly affects the state's choice of which agent to use for petroleum extraction.  First, we review the events leading to the cluster of nationalizations that occurred in the early 1970s and assess whether they were significantly affected by considerations of risk.  Second, we explore how well variation in risk and state capacity for risk can explain changing ownership over time within a particular oil province - the UK and Norwegian zones of the North Sea.  Third, we use data from energy research and consulting firm Wood Mackenzie to quantitatively test our hypothesis about the key role of risk, looking in particular at the case of oil and gas company exploration behavior.  

In all three cases, our observations are broadly consistent with the hypothesis that risk significantly affects the state's choice of hydrocarbon agent, although, as expected, other factors emerge as important drivers of outcomes as well.

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Mark C. Thurber

Immigration and Integration in Scandinavia: The Jewish Case

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As exemplified by the recent election results from Sweden, immigration is one of the most important and heated topics of debate in contemporary Scandinavian society. Immigrants are accused of being unwilling to integrate and adopt Scandinavian cultural values and practices, while the countries themselves are often criticized for not realizing that they have, in fact, become multicultural. By comparison, Jewish immigration to Scandinavia is generally regarded as a success and a strategy for others to emulate. In her presentation, Vibeke Kieding Banik will highlight some key features of Scandinavian Jewish history (with a particular focus on Norway) and argue that the skepticism characterizing the current debate was also present when Jews were allowed to emigrate to Scandinavia, and especially during the arrival of Eastern European Jews in the early 1900s.

Vibeke Kieding Banik, a Norwegian national, received her PhD in history in 2009 from the University of Oslo, where she is currently affiliated as a part time lecturer. She teaches a course entitled "The Holocaust" and supervises and examines undergraduate and postgraduate students. Her research interests include gender studies, modern Jewish history and immigration, integration and identity in Scandinavia. During her Anna Lindh fellowship at The Europe Center, Vibeke will begin work on her new project, “Gendered integration? The Jewish Encounter with Scandinavia, 1900-1940."

 

Audio Synopsis:

Dr. Kieding Banik begins by outlining the historical context of the Jewish experience in Scandinavia. She describes how early Jewish immigrants faced a homogenous, largely Lutheran Scandinavian population with strong anti-Semitic prejudices, with Norway even banning Jewish immigration entirely until 1851, for fear Jews would "overflow" the country. Immigration in all parts of Scandinavia was greatly restricted between 1880 and the beginning of World War I, before and after which time Jews from Eastern Europe arrived in greater numbers, often en route to other destinations.

While by 1918 Jews had full legal rights in Scandinavia, the amount of assimilation of Jews into local society differed between countries. For example, Jews in Denmark demonstrated higher levels of cultural assimilation, and prominence in society, academia, politics and civil society than in Sweden or Norway.

Dr. Kieding Banik goes on to describe the challenges immigrants faced as they attempted to balance assimilation with their Jewish identity; the effects of the Holocaust on Jewish populations in Scandinavia; the response of established Jewish communities to new immigrants; and the differences of experience between present-day Jewish immigrants to Scandinavia and their predecessors.

A discussion session addresses issues such as: the reasons for variety in the Jewish experience between Scandinavian countries; how post-war attitudes changed to facilitate increased Jewish integration; the relationship ofJews to other immigrant groups in Scandinavia; and the level of assistance for immigrant groups in Scandinavia today.

Reuben W. Hills Conference Room

Vibeke Kieding Banik

616 Serra Street
Encina Hall
Stanford, CA 94305-6165

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Visiting Scholar
Anna Linde Fellow
VKBanik.jpg PhD

Vibeke Kieding Banik is currently affiliated as a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Archaeology, Conservation and History, University of Oslo. Her main focus of research is on the history of minorities in Scandinavia, particularly Jews, with an emphasis on migration and integration. Her research interests also include gender history, and her current project investigates whether there was a gendered integration strategy among Scandinavian Jews in the period 1900-1940. Dr. Banik has authored several articles on Jewish life in Norway, Jewish historiography and the Norwegian women’s suffragette movement. She has taught extensively on Jewish history and is currently writing a book on the history of the Norwegian Jews, scheduled to be published in 2015.

Vibeke Kieding Banik was a visiting scholar and Anna Lindh Fellow with The Europe Center in 2013-2014.

Vibeke Kieding Banik Speaker
Seminars
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